Safety Is More Complicated Than You Might Think

NEWSLETTER ARTICLE

To paraphrase a Supreme Court Justice, I can’t define a good safety culture, but I know it when I see it. 

It turns out that defining what constitutes a good safety culture has confounded many a researcher. A team from Rice University reviewed over 50 studies related to safety culture to determine if an overall model for safety culture could be developed (Bisbey, T., Kilcullen, M., Thomas, E., Ottosen, M., Tsao, K., and Salas, E. “Safety Culture: An Integration of Existing Models and a Framework for Understanding Its Development”, Human Factors, Vol. 63, No. 1, February 2021, pp. 88–110). Notably, they were unable to find a universally accepted definition of safety culture that would encompass all the various studies.

What the researchers did find was a two-factor requirement for the creation of a safety culture. The first factors are what they term enabling factors. These create the environment in which a safety culture can emerge, and include: 

1. Organizational Factors
   1. Leader commitment and prioritization of safety
   2. Policies and resources for safety
2. Group Factors
   1. Group cohesion
   2. Psychological safety
3. Individual Factors
   1. Safety knowledge
   2. Employee sense of control
   3. Individual commitment to safety

A proper safety environment is needed to create a safety culture, but the safety culture doesn’t just happen. A set of enabling factors are necessary for the safety culture to take hold. Think of the enabling factors as preparing the soil for planting, but the water and sunshine necessary for something to grow from that soil come in the form of the enacting factors. These enacting factors are: 

1. Communication and information exchange
2. Teamwork and collaboration
3. Incident reporting
4. Fair rewarding and punishing

As an epilogue, the authors did discuss the difference between safety culture and safety climate. A brief search regarding safety climate revealed similar issues to those of safety culture, with safety climate literature having more on measurement of safety than did the safety culture.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Tolstoy). So too it seems are process plants; those with a good safety culture encompass all the factors, while those that don’t might be missing just one or more factors in a variety of combinations. 

Note: The Center for Operator Performance currently is utilizing some of these researchers in the development of a team training model for process plants. For more information, go to www.operatorperformance.org. 

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